Center for Digital Humanities Receives $126,000 Grant

The Center for Digital Humanities at Saint Louis University has been awarded $126,000 as part of a new $526,000 collaborative grant recently won by the Newberry Library of Chicago to support the creation of new digital tools to help students develop and strengthen skills for reading French manuscripts.

James Ginther, Ph.D.

James Ginther, Ph.D., director of the Center and chair of SLU's department of theology, will collaborate to provide new opportunities for academic study and research.

"The tools will enable users to teach themselves to read different early French handwritings, learn about the history of those handwriting styles and the circumstances of production of different types of manuscript documents, receive an introduction to paleography as an academic field, and engage in related online discussions and collaborative research," Ginther said.

The site will codify in English information about French paleography and will provide integrated access to an archive of historically significant manuscripts held in the collection of the Newberry Library and in North American and French repositories

The Center will work with the research team that manages Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance and the University of Toronto Libraries to develop the software. The Center will build a customized version of T-PEN (Transcription for Paleographical and Editorial Notation: t-pen.org) as well as the project's image store. That store will house more than 100 newly digitized late medieval and renaissance manuscripts from the Newberry's own collection.

Work on the project will begin in May 2014 and be completed by April 2015.